Photo: Courtesy Everett Collection
While the appeal of a guy who makes you Death Cab mixes for Chrismukkah is, and was, largely self-evident, I also wonder if there was a little bit of (gasp!) queerness wrapped up in my Seth Cohen obsession. His long-nursed crush on Summer is, after all, basically the aughts equivalent of Jay Gatsby reaching for the green light on Daisy Buchanan’s dock, and I wonder if a not-at-all-conscious part of me realized, even in seventh grade—a year when I created a shrine of Abercrombie models torn from magazines on my bedroom wall—that I identified with Seth’s longing for the girl of his dreams. Yes, Seth was my forever crush, but was he also…a means by which to stare at Rachel Bilson’s big brown eyes and shiny hair as much as I wanted, secure in the excuse that I was simply studying how to be the kind of girl that a guy I capital-L Liked might like himself?
The girls I once sat around the collage table with and I are all in our 30s now, and I have to hope we’re all letting the respective soft animals of our bodies love what they love. I, for one, am now bisexually secure enough to admit that I had (and have?) a crush on both Seth and Summer, and even though I’m a little mystified by how red-faced and giggly I get every time Adam Brody steps onscreen on Nobody Wants This, I’m trying to respect my long-ago tween self’s selection of a crush that has improbably lasted the test of time. Leighton Meester, you’re a lucky woman!
